We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel.  Suppose that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and found in some cause celebre of our day, such as the Parnell Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to The Ring and the Book.  The first monologue, which would be called “Half-London,” would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic.  The “Otherhalf-London” would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and stagnant problem.  The “Tertium Quid” would be some detached intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning monologue.  Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of Pigott.  But we should feel that the record was incomplete without another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion of such a question.  Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the world of reality.  These are the kind of little touches for which we must always be on the look-out in Browning.  Even if a digression, or a simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, let us wait a little and give it a chance.  He very seldom wrote anything that did not mean a great deal.

It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the smallest degree understand what he is talking about.  He may have intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air.  These are the sensations with which the true Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning’s critics and biographers about The Ring and the Book.  That criticism was embodied by one of them in the words “the theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity.”  Now this remark shows at once